On 09 Dec 2013, at 01:33, LizR wrote:
On 9 December 2013 05:52, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 4:38 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could you name a materialistic theory that explains consciousness
Consciousness is the feeling information has when it is being
processed; if conscious is fundamental, that is to say it comes at
the end of a long line of "what is that?" questions, then after
saying that there is just nothing more that can be said about it.
And hey, it's just as good as a billion other consciousness theories.
Ah yes, Max Tegmark's "theory".These aren't theories, is the
problem. One needs a rigorous definition of what consciousness is,
to start with, and then a theory that explains all its observed
features, and makes testable predictions. Otherwise all one has is a
jumble of words.
To be precise, we don't need a definition of what consciousness is. WE
need only to agree on some assertion on consciousness. It is the same
with line and points. The same with natural numbers. We don't need to
define them (in fact we can't). We need only to agree on axioms about
them, and methods or rules of logical inference/deduction. And then
you are right, we need theoretical results to compare with
experimental results (like comp already provides, if we accept the
standard analytical definition of knowledge (S4)).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
